If you’re the type of person who could always use a little extra positive affirmation, or you have a weakness for weird gadgets, the Talking Flower might be of interest. I’m only kind of serious. The toy is based on a character from Super Mario Bros. Wonder that guides Mario through levels with quippy, whimsical remarks. It’s a little weird that it even exists, but, then again, this is the company that made Alarmo.The Talking Flower debuted for $34.99, but it got a small price reduction at Amazon and Walmart. It’ll instead cost you $29.99 to buy the cute talking toy. Nintendo Talking FlowerWhere to Buy: $34.99 $29.99 at Amazon $34.99 $29.99 at WalmartThe Talking Flower doesn’t have much utility. Unlike the $110 Alarmo, it can’t serve as an alarm even though it asks when you go to bed and wake up (so that it knows when to keep quiet). It’s there to call out every passing hour when you’re awake, and to say random stuff unprompted. It can make comments about the general time of day, as well as the temperature thanks to its built-in thermometer. The Talking Flower lacks a microphone, and it doesn’t connect to the internet. However, it has a button that’ll make it say things, if you don’t want to wait for it to randomly blurt out its pre-programmed thoughts. Like in the video game, you can select the language it speaks.My colleague Andrew Webster went hands-on with the Talking Flower, and his takeaway was that it’s a drip feed of whimsy. However, it would occasionally say something that reminded Andrew to take care of himself, whether it be to slow down and relax or to take a lunch break. I’m entertained by many reviews on Amazon, which highlight that buyers are split on being annoyed with the Talking Flower, but loving it anyway — just like the character in Wonder.

Databases nested inside dashboards nested inside a workspace I'd tuned over the course of a couple of years was the main appeal of Notion. But it's also what ultimately makes people leave, because it requires quite a bit of maintenance, which ends up shoving the writing and task management part to the side. There's also the ownership question; when your writing sits inside a proprietary cloud workspace, "your data" is only true up to the point that you can still log in.

A luxurious hot shower anywhere you go. Hot showers, like electricity, are a luxury that's easy to take for granted. That all changes after a few nights camping at a music festival, a week toiling at a backcountry job site, or overlanding all summer in the great unknown. An itchy scalp and the vague smell of warm clams suddenly make the idea of spending hundreds on a portable shower seem less absurd. I've been testing the Hottap Go from Australia-based Joolca while vanlifing to shower after surfing and to wash up after cooking. It features a 12L integrated water tank which is an improvement on other portable showers that require an external container and long, cumbersome hose th …Read the full story at The Verge.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb will head the UAP Science Advisory Council established by the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and "the intelligence community." The Council will provide scientific reports and advice to the UAP Governing Board, in an effort to "resolve the nature of UAP," or unidentified anomalous phenomena.On paper, Loeb's qualifications seem strong. And he's surrounded himself with a team from a variety of backgrounds. The Council includes not only physicists, but a pathologist, a computer scientist, a philosopher, a psychologist, and even the founding publisher of S …Read the full story at The Verge.

So, you just got a new Wi-Fi 7 router, hoping to leave the dark ages of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E behind. The massive improvements in bandwidth and reliability, thanks to 4K QAM, MLO, and 320 MHz channel width, promised a dramatically snappier connection, at least according to the router's marketing. The reality is probably that the network doesn't feel any different on any of your devices, and the tiny but noticeable lag is still there on your phone, PC, and smart TV. It's probably because speed was never the bottleneck on your Wi-Fi in the first place.

You can do a lot with SBCs and microcontrollers, but one project we see pop up a lot is handheld consoles. It makes sense they're so popular; the hardware is so small that you can stick it on some simple hardware and use it to play retro games on a pocket-sized device. Such is the case of this cool ESP32-S2 game console, where all the hardware, including the screen, fits on a single board.

Roleplaying games are often defined by excess. Storylines that span dozens of hours, side quests so big they could be their own game, massive worlds that require complex maps to explore, and casts so big you start forgetting character names. That's part of what makes these games feel like epic adventures, but it can also make them intimidating, particularly if you have limited spare time. Dosa Divas, on the other hand, manages to capture much of that same feeling in a package that spans less than 10 hours. And it does it with a bold sense of style and a story that seamlessly flits between big themes and personal drama. There's just one big d …Read the full story at The Verge.

Federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in December 2025. | Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images Donald Trump's Homeland Security regime has been at the center of two critical stories in the past two weeks. In the first, federal agents shot and killed a man and quickly got to work justifying the use of force under the flimsiest of pretenses. In the other, it made house calls to people who said mean things to them online.Since taking office last year, the Trump administration has been telling us that fighting the good fight of white supremacy will make you look cool and noble. The DHS under former Secretary Kristi Noem spent $220 million to help her cosplay as a cowboy and call up ICE recruits as if we're fighting a new World War, this …Read the full story at The Verge.

Back in March, we covered an open-source camera called the Saturnix. Back then, it was a work-in-progress, but it was still cool enough to check out. The creator said they'd get something out as soon as they could, but much like everything else in life, it took more time than expected.

For a long time though, multimodal AI has had a pattern where all the impressive stuff would usually happen in the cloud. Your screenshots, voice notes, and documents would have to travel to a third party's server, get processed by someone else's model, and return with a response. The privacy implications were just the price of the convenience you'd get. All of that is fair when you're just organizing a few haphazardly arranged notes that you want to make sense of, but for anyone working with intellectual property, health information, and personally identifiable data, cloud AI presented a risk they did not have the appetite for.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 135, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, crank the AC, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about cold plunges and Colson Whitehead and the food truck mafia, finally getting to the theater to see Obsession, watching The Agency because it's apparently everyone's favorite underrated show, nodding sadly to Adam Conover's video about the death of sitcoms, making a lot of noises during the Dune: Part Three trailer, testing Atlas as a visual journal, giggling endlessly at the new InfoWars, and s …Read the full story at The Verge.

Remember when games used to be borderline unplayable on integrated graphics? For those who had a discrete GPU in their builds, that iGPU was nothing more than a backup in case the graphics card died, or you wanted to troubleshoot display issues. You could run games, sure, but when you're averaging 20FPS at the lowest settings, you're really just proving that the game launches rather than enjoying it.